Category: Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday March 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Friday February 27th Marketplace Outage

On Friday, February 27th, 2026, the Marketplace suffered an outage resulting in delays to item deliveries, background check-outs and viewer notifications for approximately 5 hours. This was apparently caused by a degradation in the MP asynchronous workers during a deployment, resulting in a backlog in the MP queuing system. The backlog should be clear now, and there have been no recent reports of missing / delayed items or notifications.

Updates

• Changes are being made to the email verification prompt that comes up on the Second Life dashboard – those who have verified their email won’t see anything (“for a while”). Those who haven’t verified their email address for contact are advised to do so.
• Updates to the web maps to allow searching by region name is still “slotted” for implementation.
• Updates are in progress for the buying land experience – the look and presentation of the pages, UI changes, etc. – not changes to current land pricing.
• The viewer splash screen will be changing soon as a part of the viewer UI / font changes contained in the upcoming 2026.02 viewer.
• Work on making the Marketplace home page more responsive on Mobile devices is continuing, with small changes already made to the sidebar.
• Quality of Life / Internal updates:
  • Further guardrails have been placed around Marketplace Product Listing Enhancements (PLEs) to prevent users being double-charged.
  • Multiple bug fixes related to wishlist displays, language selections and display name synchronisation, and similar.
  • Upgrades are being made to some web-related AWS services.

Marketplace

• Th question was asked if people felt it would be worth a break of 12-18 months on work on all Marketplace development (bug fixing, etc., still continuing), in order to get variants / styles (e.g. multiple colour options, etc.,) in a single listing produced and released.
  • Whilst stated that a “year / year-and-a-half” was “very conservative”, it was still something of a surprised given that in late 2022, Reed Linden stated variants would be the “first deployment” in 2023.
  • Spidey Linden noted that the biggest hurdle with the project is actually migrating users as smoothly as possible from having multiple listings for the same item (but in different colours) to having all options in the one listing.
  • There was support for the idea and variants  / styles is something that has long been promised and has been a popular request.
• The above spun-out into a discussion on “Marketplace 2.0”.
  • Currently there are no plans for a “Marketplace 2.0”, so this was more a “throw out ideas” session.
  • This discussion also spun out into requests for “social” elements to be included on MP listing, such as a indicator as to when a store owner last logged-in to SL, the date any item was posts to the MP (already available via some 3rd party browser plug-ins, support Firefox, Edge and Chrome and its variants – I use it with both Brave and Gener8).
• An alterative question regarded on “Marketplace 2.0”, were it to be developed, is whether merchants would access not having any migration mechanism and having to go through and manually re-list all their items on the new version.
  • This caused something of a divided response, with some seeing it as not being a problem for MP stores with large inventories, as it was argued (not unreasonably in the case of clothing), that the reason for many stores having large numbers of listings is because they have multiple colour version of each item, each with it own listing – which any new Marketplace would solve by allowing multiple variants in a single listing.
  • Others felt any requirement to manually upload to a new MP would slow adoption.
  • Still others felt that having a new MP with “more features” would still be worth the effort to give them a new, cleaner & more functional store.
• It was suggested that some of the pain in moving to a “new” MP could be eased by offering an extended transition period to allow creators to gradually make the move.
  • However, it was pointed out that running two systems side-by-side will incur additional cost and so a) would have to be factored-in to the transition period; b) would likely preclude both the current MP and “MP 2.0” running side-by-side indefinitely; sooner or later merchants would have to move.
  • There is also the risk of consumer confusion over where to find items if the transition period is drawn out to the point where creators migrate their listings in small quantities (“one or two a week” was mentioned), which could then impact sales.
• Calls were made to simply delete stores from the Marketplace on the basis of the creator not logging-in to SL for a given continuous period (currently, listings are made “inactive” if the owner has not logged-in during a certain period). This is a potentially damaging approach, as it could unfairly penalise users who are forced into a more restricted ability to log-in to SL due to social circumstance, illness, etc.
• The discussion on “MP 2.0” spun out to include integration of CasperVend and the ability to see through the MP and via in-world vendor kiosks.
• A request was make to solve the “translation issue” whereby automatic translation of products leads to things like the wrong colour being delivered (e.g. a translation referencing the “pink” item for delivery, whereas the listing shows the “red” version.

Other Items

• Community Pages / Forums Changes:
  • Concerns were raised over recent changes to the Community pages (e.g. the official blogs) / Forums — notably around logging-in.
  • These concerns took two parts:
    1. The fact that the logging-in process has been changed by the third party providing the community pages / Forum platform (Invision) to use OAuth as their authentication method, rather than the Lab’s own MFA;
    2. There was no announcement of the change by Linden Lab via blog or Forum post, in advance of it being made by Invision across their services.
  • The concern over the use of cookies seems to be (in part) born of misunderstanding: cookies are a “standard” means of maintaining login session IDs. However OAuth appears to be retaining the cookie after a user has physically logged-out from the Community pages via the sign-out option (which does not mean logging-out of SL), which appears to be the problem.
  • Kermit Linden offered to look into the authorisation flow.

• The issue of  SL wiki thumbnail images not displaying has been partially resolved, but more work is required to completely resolve it.
• A request was made to add a further SL Discord generic category for those whose blogs fall outside the current three categories of  fashion, home & garden and bloggers-streamers.
• Complaints that 2 clicks to reach a person’s transaction history on the SL dashboard, and Marketplace is too hard and the labelling is not precise (which is fair).
• A general discussion on web search and its perceived drawbacks (such as being unable to exclude display Names from People searches, thus leading to “false positives” when seeking user names etc.)..
• A discussion on being able to “register” brand names with LL to prevent things like copycat stores using the same name, or having stores using the sane name / word in their keywords coming ahead of registered stores in MP searches.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, April 1st, 2026.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday February 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

• The past month has largely been focused on planning and information gathering as the Web team works out priorities for the year ahead. As such, direction an initiatives may change as decision are made based on information gathered.
• Current work in progress:
  • Marketplace responsiveness work (i.e. making it more Mobile-friendly), particularly focused on the Marketplace home page and including things like category total to the site navigation sidebar, possibly making the Feature Items on the page high contrast.
  • Refresh of the viewer log-in splash screen, described as “same item, just a different arrangement”. This will b an iterative process within viewer releases as updates are made.
  • Possibly adding the long-requested ability to search by region on the web maps – although this is described a “complicated”. This work might also include some clean-up of other web maps issues that have been raised.
  • A clean-up of legacy codebases.
  • Upgrading the log-in infrastructure.
  • Release of the viewer log-in email modal, asking people to make sure they have a valid email address on file with LL.

In Brief

Also refer to the video.

Marketplace

• Question to attendees:  if you were a merchant, which Marketplace page would you like to have responsive and would be the most useful to you? currently, Search and listing pages are responsive.
  • This got side-tracked somewhat be a request for data on the number of Mobile users using the Marketplace and questioning why Mobile users would want to have access to the Marketplace, given “they can’t wear anything” (so what? I frequently brose the MP via my PC’s browser without having the viewer running; doesn’t stop me from buying stuff for later, even if I cannot wear it when using my browser; the same is likely true for established users on Mobile).
  • In terms of Mobile responsiveness and merchants – would a merchant use Mobile to manage their listings, etc., over logging-in via their desktop / laptop and managing their stores?
  • A broader preference was expressed for the consumer experience on on Mobile to be more responsive.
• The Variants / Style work – allowing one listing to have all the colour options for an item – which under Reed Linden’s time at the Lab was a focus to the point of being promised at the “first deployment” in 2023 – appeared to ultimately get swallowed by a black hole. There may be a (further) move to get it back onto the roadmap.
• A discussion on providing the cost of items in two currencies on MP listing – L$ and local currency (or USD), the idea being to put how much items in SL cost in real terms to help new users. There are complexities to this.
• Suggestions for the  “Related Items” in listings  should also have:
  • A “Quick Buy” button to add them to the shopping cart without having to open the actual listing and then add it.
  • A “Quick Demo” button to obtain the demo of an item (if the creator provides one) without having to go to the main listing and then click on the demo link and then add the demo to the shopping cart.
  • Both of these options could also be added to Search results as well, allowing people to click through a list of search returns and add the items they want to their cart.

General

• Question to attendees: which web property would you like to see all nicely polishing and “finished”? Maps was inevitably referenced (as was having the SL Map on the viewer splash screen – which is most certainly a non-trivia project to undertake, together with specific pages in the MP and web search.
  • My preference would be for the Second Life dashboard to be overhauled (elements made more directly accessible, navigation improved, use of drop-downs for things like Groups and Friends lists, options for better input from LL – such as “mini posts” offered as pop-ups within the dashboard, as was once the case, etc.). The dashboard is a core centre for information but looks terribly dated in layout.
• Canny often receives suggestion for new Canny categories. Should these be submitted individually or as a “group” of suggestions? Group them.
• It is unlikely that Web User Group meetings will move to a more frequent cadence than once a month as some have requested (ironically, they have also stated other meetings can be “dry” – possibly as a result of them being held too frequently, leaving some meetings with little to discuss).
• Several subjective opinions were expressed:
  • Banning gacha because “I don’t like them” (so don’t use them – and let those who do carry on).
  • No icons in MP category listings because “I hate them”. Well, they serve an accessibility purpose and are cross-language –  although subjectively, I’d personally like to see some of them made more relevant to their category – what has a figure apparently hanging by one hand from an invisible branch have to do with “Apparel”? Why not an icon an actual item of apparel – pants or a shirt or a dress? If people have to decode an icon by reading its label, then the point of the icon is lose.
  • The icons discussion led to a suggestion that LL should see if descriptions / definitions could be added to categories, so that a mouseover or click would display them.
• A general discussion on whether gacha items are “use items” or not (yes and no) and to whom the gacha market is aimed.
• Various discussions on payment methods and other topics in the last third of the meeting.
• Whilst not a topic for this meeting, it was suggested that the SL URL create.secondlife.com is confusing, suggesting it is for general content creation, whereas the actual portal to which it resolves is focused solely on SLua / LSL scripting(why not script.secondlife.com?).

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, March 4th, 2026.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 14th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

• The past month hasn’t been very active for the web team due to the holiday season. There has been a focus on internal updates, security patching, and clean up.
• Some of the above include:
  • Additional security features around marketplace to increase security and add resilience.
  • Version upgrades to LL’s internal services for security upgrades.
  • Upcoming security feature to nudge residents to update and verify their email address on file.
• There is also something of a focus on trying to clear-up outstanding Canny issues (so maybe this and this will get addressed?).
• There is a hope that the focus on back-end services, whilst not necessarily visible to users will this help to see the overall experience of using the Marketplace, etc., become far smoother with fewer outages, issues with people being overcharged for product listing enhancements (PLEs), etc.
• A significant push for 2026 will be “first impressions” / the new user experience -trying to further improve things so that incoming users have a generally positive experience which encourages them to keep logging-in.

In Brief

• Kali Linden departed the Lab around the end of November / beginning of December to become VP of system security at a new start-up. Many thanks to her in absentia for all her work a LL.
  • As a result of this, the Lab’s web engineering are operating on a “shared ownership” basis until someone can be hired-in to fill Kali’s role.
  • Kali’s departure also means that some of the planned roadmap for web properties (e.g. the Marketplace UI overhaul) are being reassessed in terms of what can / should be achieved, etc.
• There have been reports of the SL forums running “slowly” for people in the UK (and Europe?). The Forums are operated by a third-party supplier, and somewhat outside of LL’s direct control. This has been escalated to the forum vendor, but not other updates at present.
• A request was made to be able to transfer L$ amounts between accounts / to others via a user’s secondlife.com Dashboard – with suitable security in place.
  • This was seen as an “interesting” idea, but would likely require some additional security – such as being tied-into MFA.
  • No commitment was made towards implementing the idea at this time, because further investigation on requirements, etc., would be required.
  • A suggestion was made to set a limit on how much a user directly transfer – or allowing a user to set a limit on the amount (e.g. account-to-account, rather than via a vendor or similar system) at any one time, in order to safeguard accounts against being emptied if successfully hacked. This was also seen as potentially interesting, but could be a  dynamic / fluid set of rules.
• LindeX use, transaction fees, etc., came up for discussion (although perhaps better placed at the content Creation meeting, where people who routinely cash-out from SL are liable to be in attendance).
  • A loose consensus at the Web meeting was that greater clarification should be given as to what can be paid for directly using L$ / the USD wallet &without incurring additional processing fees (e.g. some users apparently think they have to convert L$ to dollars in order to pay their tier, etc.).
  • A clearer break down of the current transaction fees in a single place (buy for L$, credit processing for cashing-out, cost for subscribers, etc.) could perhaps be given within the Dashboard.
• A discussion on SL maps – including searching by region name, improving World Map tile resolution, enhancing the map capabilities in general, etc.
  • A fair point was made that the maps are a core way of expressing the size and persistence of SL – yet the capability and the functions around it are perceived as being of little interest to LL management when it comes to prioritising updates, etc., with the focus appearing to be only on areas that directly affect commence in SL.
  • Maps are a vital component in the “first impression” aspect of Second Life – if incoming users can be encouraged to understand the SL is bigger than the welcome hubs and the selected destinations beyond them – and that they can, using the maps – explore on their own / in conjunction with the Destination Guide, then there is a motivation for them to keep logging-in and to start exploring.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, February 4th, 2026.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday December 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

• Upgrades to marketplace PLE retry logic following the issues experienced in October.
• Testing and evaluating marketplace security options intended to offer grater security for merchants on the MP and users of the MP.
• Work on account security feature to prompt users to verify their emails to reduce account takeovers.
• Quality of life update: deployed a bugfix for description character counter.

In Brief

• The following question was asked by LL: If you could REMOVE a feature from Second Life’s web interface, what would it be (i.e. items viewed as annoying / low-use, not things that might be considered bugs requiring fixing)? Responses included:
  • Removal of the Download Second Life banner on the right of a user’s dashboard (under the Lindens Homes banner), on the grounds that the vast majority of SL users will likely have already downloaded and installed the viewer when accessing their dashboard.
  • The removal / update of the Events section of the dashboard.
• Requests were made regarding:
  • Providing better traffic information through the DG / Search, etc. For example: ensuring traffic numbers are more immediate rather than possibly referencing the previous 24 hours; perhaps providing more of an average metric (e.g. average number of users of a 24, 48, 72 hours or similar period, etc.), or a mix of both (e.g. users currently within a region + an average over a period of time).
  • Enabling panoramic images taken via the 360º snapshot function to be more widely used within SL web properties (e.g. such as the Destination Guide) and / or to be stored in a manner such that they can be used in the About tab of landmark / place floaters, etc.
  • SL’s web map page to support searches by region name as well as the current options.
  • Clarification on how to get edit rights to the SL Wiki – in short, due to issues of spamming text to the wiki via bots, etc., editing rights must now be requested via e-mail.
  • When better guidelines on the uploading / labelling, etc., of AI-generated content to the Marketplace might be forthcoming. This was said to be still subject to internal decision-making.
• It was pointed out that login-in tokens may not always be passed to the in-viewer web browser (e.g. someone is using the viewer and receives a link to the Destination Guide, which opens the in-viewer browser, they may still be asked to log-in to the DG website within the browser – despite effectively being logged-in to SL – rather than the in-viewer browser loading the Destination Guide main page).
• General discussions on (refer to video)
  • Translations within SL properties and the viewer UI, etc. In short:
    • A third-party service (not an AI tool) is used for translations.
    • If those fluent in a given language notice errors in translation, they can report them via the feedback portal.
    • It was noted that translation within SL can be difficult due to the number of “made-up” words / terms which might not readily be recognised as “simple” brand names or specific-to-SL-terms without a more generally translatable term.
  • The date last updated field within Marketplace listings (which currently has a bug so it might not display the correct date, which is being investigated) and for the addition of a Date Uploaded field within listings, so users have both.
    • As a side note, user Tjay Wicken provides a browser extension which adds the date uploaded and a list of tags used for the listing. For details see:
      • Tjay’s forum post on the extension.
      • Extension versions: Chrome Web Store (works with Brave, Generat8, et.), Firefox Add-ons page, and the Edge Add-ons page.
      • Github repository (including instructions).
  • Marketplace reviews, including giving a clear idea of what the star ranking means (e.g. 1= “I don’t recommend it” through to 4 = “this is good” and 5 = “this is perfect”) in order to try to clarify to merchants and consumers alike what people are indicating when they provide a star rating.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday November 5th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

• Upgrades to Marketplace tech stack and adding resilience to systems in the case of external outages (as happened this summer with Elastic Search).
• Further account security initiatives which will be rolling out soon, some of which should help prevent attempts at account take-overs.
• The roll-out of the “No Stipend” Premium Plus subscription. See:
  • Coming soon: New Option to Reduce the Cost of SL Premium Plus-Subscriptions – see this blog.
  • Why Premium Plus Without Stipend Might be Your Perfect Match – LL blog.
  • The launch appears to have been positively received by many users.
• Marketplace PLE blip:
  • PLEs were not charged between October 6th through October 28th inclusive, although subscriptions were still active and running. This caused a batch charge to occur on October 28th, which proved difficult for merchants.
  • If any merchants believe they were charged more than once as a result of these issues, please raise a support ticket.
  • LL is now working on adding more logging to these systems to prevent similar situations in the future.
• Quality of life updates:
  • A fix to correct viewer splash screen images being cut off.
  • A fix for a display bug were review font sizes were off.
• Under-the-hood work including:
  • Completion of the Python library upgrade for internal services.
  • A Redis upgrade which should improve shopping cart contents persistence across sessions.

General Discussion

• The question of Marketplace / CasperVend integration was once again raised. The short answer to this is:
  • Yes, the Lab would like to work on integration between Marketplace and the in-world shopping experience offered by CasperVend, but this requires working on some baseline tech and updates which have yet to be put in place.
  • The Lab is also keen to see a bi-directional unification of features between CasperVend and the Marketplace (e.g. features of CasperVend such as gift cards, better support for sales and discounts being extended to the MP, and features within the MP not found within CasperVend also being extended that way).
  • Currently there are no time frames as to when any of this work is likely to surface.
• A request was made for merchants to be able to delete “negative” or “harassing” reviews (a problematic request as best, given it could open the door to the deletion of any “negative” review a merchant takes issue with, no matter how valid the actual critique).
  • It was pointed out that there are already the means to flag genuinely harassing, etc., viewers.
  • It was also indicated that a request had been put forward to make the names of reviewers active links, allowing others users to click and see all reviews by a given individual, thus allowing them to better judge the reviewer’s objectiveness.
• The request to make Marketplace images clickable to display larger version / to zoom-in on them was again raised.
  • It was indicated that LL are considering implementing some form of image zoom capability / support for higher-resolution images on MP listings.
  • However, with the focus on quality of life improvements, bug fixes, etc., this work has yet to be prioritised.
  • This led to a further discussion on MP images encompassing their use by the visually impaired, how Amazon handles images, etc.
• Kali Linden noted another capability that is being considered is that of a “Demo / Try Before You Buy” button within MP listings. However, (and again), how this might work and when it might actually be implemented is still open to question.
• A discussion on listings & translations and sometimes listing being mis-translated, which rolled into a general discussion on the presentation of the Marketplace website (not making full use of the browser tab width), issues with people mistaking items in the Featured section on the MP homepage as “recommended” items, rather than paid advertising; new users being unable to easily differentiate between “modern” content (e.g. good mesh with (or without) PBR and older flexiprim or sculptie content or low-resolution skins etc.),  as by default, listings do not offer any indication of an item’s age (e.g. when first uploaded), etc.
• A discussion on the Second Life dashboard and possible improvements. Suggestions included:
  • Making the Friends Online and Groups lists more usable (e.g. so that Friends and Groups can actually be managed from them rather than having to go in-world to do so)
  • Displaying Group notices within a section of the dashboard.
  • Making elements such as Friends Online pop-outs in their own browser frames.
  • Updating the Blogs section with the feeds from the SL Blogger Network feeds as well as including the official blogs.
  • Implementing a dark mode for the pages in line with other SL pages / portal (e.g. the Linden Homes pages and the Land portal).
  • Providing more in the way of dynamic / updated content to encourage engagement, together with more informative communications from the Lab.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 1st, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

Meeting Overview

• The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and text.
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Updates

• Bug fixes shipped:
  • MFA login issue.
  • Marketplace ANS delete issue.
  • The Apostrophes Break SL Web Map issue has been fixed via a simulator update.
• Removal of “What’s Next” Basics in dashboard menu.
• More results should now be displayed in Destination guide searches.
• Under-the-hood work including:
  • A Python library upgrade for internal services.
  • A security review of the Lab’s JavaScript packages.
  • Clean-up of the subscriptions services to prevent double-charging of PMEs.

New Premium Plus Subscription Option

For those not aware:

• Mid-October will see the launch of Premium Plus No Stipend.
  • All of the benefits of Premium Plus without the Stipend or Signup bonus.
  •  Monthly Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $29.99 vs. US $15.99.
  • Annual Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $249 vs. US $143.88 (US $11.99/month billed annually).
• For details, see my blog post: Coming soon: New Option to Reduce the Cost of SL Premium Plus-Subscriptions.

Questions from the Lab

• Why do you make all your items no transfer? Are most items no transfer?
  • Most items are created No Transfer (75%-90% in estimates), although the return of Gacha might be increasing the number of transferable items.
  • No transfer is preferred for multiple reasons. Those cited included: complexities of customer support with transfer items then have been passed from one user to another; the risk of object loss if an item is set to No Copy as a result of being set to Transfer (e.g. through accidental deletion & trash purge). Most users prefer to have Copy / Modify items over Transfer (/ No Copy) / Modify items.
• What would encourage creators to make items transferrable?
  • Largely a matter of personal choice, but Transfer was not seen as a popular need.
  • The exceptions to this were seen as items specifically designed to be gifted / intended for the Gacha units & the resale market.
• How do you attract new users to your stores? Gifts? Credits? Responses included: Group gifts; store credits / discounts; sales / special offers.
• Has anyone used the new Avatar Welcome Pack? Have you made items for it?
  • Unsurprisingly, mixed opinions on the avatars in the Welcome Pack, although it was noted that as the bodies are Legacy, many creators have clothing available for them, even if the clothing is not specifically created with the starter avatars in mind.
  • Complaints were raised over the fact feet are not posable (so high heel shoes won’t work with them), and the “dead face” expressions – with reminders that the Welcome Pack avatars are just that: for getting started, before moving on to more capable store-bought avatars.
  • This lead to a discussion on what could / might be included in the Welcome Pack – such as a limited AO system from one of the dedicated AO creators, just to again help people get started and not necessarily try to work out where they need to shop or immediately diving into the MP.
• For those who have helped new users create an avatar via the Welcome Pack, what have been the common problems?
  • Feedback ran from lack of variety in the avatars (e.g. all of them are human); lack of contextual / explanatory information.
  • General feedback on bodies / heads in general was the over complexity of things and the steps a new user must go through (even after exposure to the Welcome Packs), together with easily identifying what will / won’t work with a given body type / head type if the new user is not familiar with brands, BoM, using HUDs, etc.
• How long would you say an experienced user would take to create a really good avatar?
  • Estimates varied from “5 minutes” to “an hour”, depending on approach (e.g. having the necessary avatar parts – head, body, etc.), already in inventory and working from there, vs going out and shopping for a suitable body / head, etc., vs. using the Avatar Welcome Pack.
  • It was noted that helping new users build / customise avatars takes much longer, both due to the general learning curve and the need to overcome the technical / language barriers (e.g. explaining what “BoM” is, why only certain clothing will fit certain bodies, how to recognise what is needed from multi-body pack of clothing in order to wear the outfit on the avatar, etc.).
• What would you say is the average cost of a good avatar?
  • Just for a head, body, skin, hair and initial outfit: US $50, although cost is relative depending on what is being sought.
  • This also folded itself into people’s expectations / desires for their avatar and its looks.

General Points

• Sntax Linden noted that the Avatar Picker / Customiser found in Project Zero is now offered in the official viewer, but without the dedicated Avatar toolbar button, the Picker opening within the viewer rather than as a separate browser panel.
• It was pointed out (as I’ve done previously), that the official welcome hub is out-of-step with the Avatar Welcome Pack as it only references the Senra avatars.
• The Q&A session included a wide-ranging discussion on approaches to getting new users acclimatised to SL using a mix of web options / capabilities and in-world experiences.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.